Brian Friel revealed Ireland, past and present, to itself
The great playwright's fictional Ballybeg has become part of the Irish psyche " it's a kind of everyplace, where the whole business of being human is laid bareYou will search maps of Donegal in vain for Ballybeg, the setting for almost all of Brian Friel's plays. There are no coordinates; no roads lead to or from it; no public records exist in the archives of any local council. Yet the fictional Ballybeg is every bit…